Without the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s set of 50 more great novels of the 20th century, it might have been a very long time before I heard of Andrzej Stasiuk, let alone read any of his books. Stasiuk was born in Warsaw in 1960, but he makes his home in a small town in Poland’s furthest southern reaches. He did not fit in well in communist-era Poland: he was dismissed from secondary school, dropped out of vocational school, and spent more than a year in jail for deserting the army. His literary career did not begin until after the old system collapsed. He has published nearly two dozen books, a number of which have been translated into English.
Die Welt hinter Dukla — the German title translates as The World Behind Dukla although the book’s title in both its Polish original and its English translation is simply Dukla — is apparently typical of Stasiuk’s work in that it is long on impressions, short on plot, and somewhere in the middle on character, with most of the characterizations emerging from the impressions. Dukla itself is a real town in southeastern Poland, population about 2,000, about 20km north of the border with Slovakia, about 60km west of the border Ukraine. I don’t doubt that it’s physically very much as Stasiuk describes, though the narrator’s impressions, recollections and evaluations are obviously the matter of Stasiuk’s art.